The Ambivalent Enterprise: Medical Activities of the Red Cross Society of Japan in the Northeastern Region of China during the Russo-Japanese War

Abstract

This essay examines the hygiene measures and other medical activities deployed by the Red Cross Society of Japan for non-combatant indigenous people in the northeastern region of China during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, through an analysis of the ideological operation of international normative politics of humanitarianism and civilisation behind these medical efforts. Assigned to the health care programmes for the indigenous population during the war, Japanese Red Cross workers rigorously implemented medical and sanitary measures within the areas occupied by the Japanese army. By introducing Western medicine and the modern principle of hygiene to the region, these medical workers ideologically differentiated themselves from ‘uncivilised’ native people based on the prevailing discourses on the standard of civilisation. Projecting asymmetric relations between the ‘civilised’ and those deemed ‘uncivilised’ in international society onto the Japanese military administration over the native population, the medical gaze of Red Cross workers provided a moral basis for the Japanese semi-colonial order over the region. Through an interactive process of coercion, adaptation, and resistance between Japanese Red Cross workers and native people, the global current of modern Western medicine came to take on a distinctive expression localised in the semi-colonial politics in the northeastern region of China.